What does Tribe teach about being a witness?
Drawn from the message where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At Tribe, the teaching on being a witness starts with the word itself. Brian Mitchell pointed out that the Greek word translated 'witness' in Acts 1:8 is 'martys,' the root of the English word martyr. A witness is not someone passing along second-hand information. A witness has a first-hand account, something they saw with their own eyes and cannot honestly deny. That distinction shapes everything about how the church understands what Jesus was asking of His followers.
Brian also spent significant time on the power behind the witness. The Holy Spirit in the New Covenant is not a temporary outside force, the way He came upon Samson or Bezalel and then departed. He takes up permanent residence inside the believer. Drawing from 1 Corinthians 2:10-14, John 14:26, and Ephesians 1:17-18, Brian walked through what the Spirit actually does: He searches out and reveals the deep things of God, teaches and reminds believers of everything Jesus said, and floods the heart with light. The practical point Brian kept returning to was that cultivating a direct relationship with the Holy Spirit is what makes witness possible, because the Holy Spirit's favorite subject is Jesus.
To show what first-hand witness has looked like across history, Brian read accounts of people who were executed for refusing to recant their faith, including Polycarp, John Huss, a young woman named Perpetua, and Hugh Latimer. He was careful to say that none of these people were earning anything by dying. They were simply unable to deny what they had seen and known to be true. That is the picture Acts 1:8 is painting: not a program or a technique, but a life so shaped by encounter with Jesus and the Holy Spirit that honest denial becomes impossible.
Taught from Acts 1:8 · 1 Corinthians 2:10-14 · John 14:26 · Ephesians 1:17-18 · John 20:1-16
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 2:10-14
10 But to us, God revealed them through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.
11 For who among men knows the things of a man, except the spirit of the man, which is in him? Even so, no one knows the things of God, except God’s Spirit.
12 But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might know the things that were freely given to us by God.
13 Which things also we speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual things.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- April 19, 2026 Faith Under Pressure Brian Hunter walks through Acts 1:8 to show how the Holy Spirit empowers ordinary people to be faithful witnesses to a risen Jesus, no matter the pressure they face.